Heroes Read online

  Heroes

  For Mara.

  With thanks

  to Marc Côté, Jan Geddes, Anne McDermid,

  Tom Noyes, Miles Wilson, Michael Winter, and the

  Ontario Arts Council.

  HEROES

  a novel

  Ray Robertson

  Copyright © Ray Robertson 2000

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

  transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or

  otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of

  Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from the Canadian Copyright

  Licensing Agency.

  Editor: Marc Côté

  Design: Scott Reid

  Printer: Transcontinental Printing Inc.

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Robertosn, Ray, 1966-

  Heroes

  ISBN 0-88924-292-5

  I. Title.

  PS8585.03219H47 2000 C813’.54 COO-930044-9

  PR9199.2.R62H47 2000

  1 2 3 4 5 04 03 02 01 00

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and

  the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing program.

  Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author

  and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credit in subsequent editions.

  J. Kirk Howard, President

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  Printed on recycled paper.

  Dundurn Press

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  All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.

  Their women cluck like starved pullets,

  Dying for love.

  Therefore,

  Their sons grow suicidally beautiful

  At the beginning of October,

  And gallop terribly against each others bodies.

  James Wright

  “Autumn Begins in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio”

  If you can’t beat ‘em in the alley, you cant beat ‘em on the ice

  Conn Smythe

  Let’s talk. All right, I’ll talk. I’ll talk and you’ll listen. You’ve done enough talking for a lifetime, anyway, and I guess I could use the practice. I’ve had one drink and I’m going to have another, but even if I have just one more after that I’m not going to get drunk. Dark wood panelling covering these walls; plenty of pistachios and smoked almonds gratis all along the length of this oak bar; every bent elbow in here covered in serious shades of sober grey tweed: this just isn’t that kind of place.

  But even if it was that kind of place I don’t want to get drunk. What I want is to get a little bit tipsy and feel the wiggle of my toes in my socks in my shoes and breathe a deep afterwork breath and on the way home pick up a Vegetarian Deluxe Pizza from Papa Ciao’s and eat my dinner in front of the game on television tonight. I’m a vegetarian now, you know. And no, all those lectures you used to lay on the old man and Mum and me every night at supper on the systematic mass slaughter of our fellow animal friends haven’t finally managed to sink in after all these years. For me, it’s just a health thing. I mean, talk to any scientist worth his test tubes and he’ll tell you that too much animal flesh in your diet is like eating pure poison. So wipe that grin off your face, little sister, for me it’s all about doing what just makes sense.

  Anyway, the hockey game starts at 7:30 and I’ve got to stop off and pick up that pizza, but I’ve got some time. Maybe now’s not when we ought to finally sit down and say all the things that should have gotten said already, but it looks like it’s the best I can do. Tough luck for you, I guess, but I’m the only brother you’re ever going to get. Too little or too late, we’re stuck with each other, Patty. Me and you. Stuck.

  So let’s talk. And let me call me Bayle and you I’ll call Patty. Because, to be honest, I’m just not ready for that naked “I” all by itself just yet. But then I was never even half as brave as you. I’m not even sure if I ever want to be.

  But the game doesn’t start for another couple of hours and it’s nice and dark and quiet in here and at least we’re finally really going to talk, so who knows? Maybe there’s time yet for you to teach your big brother Peter a thing or two about being brave.

  PART ONE

  1

  “SO I cold-cocked the Gook sonofabitch right in the face. And that, young man, is the name of that tune.”

  Bayle shot the remains of his one-and-a-quarter-ounce bag of unsalted peanuts and considered his options. Telling himself that demanding thirteen baby bottles of Canadian Club whiskey and shouting ancient Greek maxims at whoever attempted to interfere wasn’t going to be one of them, he forced his attention back to the copy of Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism opened up on the tray in front of him. Only the feigned studying act seemed capable of slowing down his American aisle-side seatmate’s steady flow of assorted tales of Yankee glory.

  He was, he let Bayle know almost immediately upon boarding during the stopover in Cincinnati, an ex-air force man of twenty-three years, had served three and a half of those years proudly defending the Free World in Korea, had voted for Reagan twice and would have a third time if they would have let him, and guessed that if English was good enough for Jesus Christ it sure as hell should be good enough for the United States of America. The man also let Bayle know that he was fairly confident of an ETA in Tulsa, Oklahoma, of 1:35 p.m.

  Bayle admitted that he wasn’t sure what his own ETA was and tried to concentrate on the Empiricus with the explanation that he had to study for a big exam when he returned to Toronto. The man volunteered that Bayle looked a little old to still be in school. Bayle answered back a little defensively that he wasn’t just in school, he was in graduate school, a Ph.D candidate in philosophy with a speciality in Greek Hellenism, specifically the works of the third-century sceptic Sextus Empiricus. The man looked at Bayle like he’d just confessed to never having eaten a Big Mac or wanted to go to Disneyland.

  Therefore, he who suspends judgement about everything which is subject to opinion reaps a harvest of the most complete happiness.

  Brain, as usual of late, encountering difficulty sticking to the page, Flying is a lot like whiskey, Bayle thought. Stop right there; metaphors, no. No thank you, no. Always taking you places you don’t want to be.

  The window next to him viewless since he’d pulled down the plastic cover immediately upon locating his seat, the other passengers surrounding him the same for their assorted food-and-drink-shovelling-and-slurping, paperback-turning, U.S.A. Todaying, and laptop-punching, Bayle scanned the plane for possible diversion.

  An elderly nun one seat ahead of him on the other side of the aisle absently fingered a small silver cross hanging from around her neck as she read from a worn, black Bible spread out on her lap. She lifted her head from the book from time to time to smile a soft smile at no one at all and everyone. For the official record, as far as Bayle was concerned, Christians were just Platonists with a bleeding cover boy, the very metaphysically mucky antithesis of the clean logical lines of hard sceptical indifference that world-wary Empiricus had laid down two centuries after the celebrated J.C.’s lifetime. Still, he couldn’t help but envy the nun he
r slightly glazed state of happy labour.

  Bayle closed his eyes and leaned back in his seat, not the first time in what felt like a very long time that a bad case of purpose-envy turned his thoughts toward immediate membership in that not-so-exclusive Canadian Club so often frequented by all those similarly anxious for two thick fingers of quick liquid meaning. Which is to say Bayle wanted a drink. Or two, or three. Or eight.

  In the eighteen months since he’d passed his foreign language exams and written his period and subject tests all Bayle had to do was defend his dissertation and he was done, would have his doctorate. Bayle, however, on the brink of official sceptical citizenship, felt like nothing so much as a swaggering secret virgin frightened out of his false macho bluster by a seasoned hooker’s impatient command to either make it happen or to put it back in his pants. Whatever else in the past year and a half he couldn’t put his name to, this, without a doubt: the dreaded shrunken truth-table; to wit, fear, for some reason, of the philosophical finish line.

  At the same time, power-drinking and resultant alcohol-assisted hi-jinks of varying degrees of self-depravation more nights a week than not at renowned Queen Street West dive Knott’s Place, a practice that was doing absolutely nothing for his liver, his stalled interest in his work, or his relationship with his girlfriend of almost three years, Jane. Particularly vexing was Bayle’s recent inclination for leaving late-night Empiricus and strong spirits-soaked messages on the answering machine of the early-to-bed and early-to-rise Jane, the former never failing to hang up when the latter managed to make it to the phone, Bayle — regardless of what Jane’s call display might say to the contrary — never failing to deny afterward all knowledge of the calls.

  None of which should have necessitated that he travel a thousand miles away from home to write an article on minor-league hockey in the American mid-west for Toronto Living, a monthly magazine catering to the interests of young Canadian professionals. Except that in Bayle’s case, it did.

  He opened his eyes to the warm smile of the nun, her pleasantly age-scarred face staying with him even after she’d moved herself stoop-shouldered down the aisle to the washroom at the back of the plane. Although Bayle and his sister, Patty, had been raised as good Canadian agnostics — “God is love,” Bayle’s father had impatiently answered his pubescent son’s between-periods theological awakening, eager to give his attention back to the Maple Leaf-Red Wing playoff game playing on the livingroom television — Patty had undergone what their mother referred to as her Catholic Thing.

  By Grade 11 Bayle’s sister had successfully convinced their recently widowed mother that the cost of allowing her to complete her high-school years at a private, downtown Toronto Catholic school — and not at the nearby suburban Etobicoke public high school — was well worth it, both because of the superior education she would be receiving and because she likely wouldn’t have to spend the majority of her free time fighting off the sometimes crude advances of her male classmates. Even by her first year of high school, the hockey-playing, beer-guzzling Etobicoke boys never knew quite what to make of tall, brilliant, and undeniably beautiful Patty.

  Of course, to Bayle — and Bayle alone — Patty had immediately revealed her true motive: the wonderfully sinful thrill of reading the Catholic Church’s entire index librorum prohibititorum right under the nun’s noses.

  “But we’re not Catholic,” Bayle had protested.

  They were lying where they did whenever Patty really needed to talk, backs to the carpet on the floor of her bedroom, undergraduate university man Bayle making the trip back to Etobicoke because Patty had called him up the night before with “some really incredible news, Peter, I mean, really, really, incredible news.” Their heads were almost touching although neither was able to see the face of the other, only the plain white ceiling up above. A record of Gregorian chants, another recent enthusiasm, moaned from Patty’s Simpson-Sears stereo.

  “Just think,” Patty said, ignoring her brother’s objection, “this time next year I’ll be in the lavatory at Lorreto’s smoking the day’s first cigarette and cracking open Our Lady of the Flowers. Genet was on the list for years, you know.”

  “Lavatory” was one of a handful of linguistic leftovers remaining from what their mother still called Patty’s British Thing. This after, successively, the Kennedy Conspiracy Thing, the Punk Thing, and the Ecology Thing. A faded Union Jack and The Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling lay cardboard-boxed and buried in the garage under their mother’s broken sewing machine and Bayle’s old hockey equipment, never spoken of between any of them.

  “Look, Patty,” Bayle said, “I really don’t want to be the one to spoil your party, but, uhm ....”

  And he didn’t. Not really. But he did. Almost always, Bayle did.

  From the womb, it seemed, Bayle knew that two and two were four and couldn’t ever forget it, as fine a disposition as any level-headed logician or any pisser on any number of other people’s parades of passion as could be asked for. But who really wants to be the one going around with a calculator reminding ten-year-old kids playing ball hockey in the frozen street all day that the odds of their growing up to be just like their hockey-playing heroes are just about as good as their being struck by lightning twice in the same afternoon? I mean, who? Who really wants to be that guy?

  “But what?” Patty said. “But what, Peter?”

  “I mean,” Bayle said, “I’m not an authority or anything, but the way I understand it there’s this one little thing you’ve got to have to be considered a Catholic.”

  “What little thing?”

  “Well, God.”

  He couldn’t see them, but Bayle could hear his sister scratching away at the backs of her hands. Every one of Patty’s new enthusiasms was born of a sudden burst of maniacal energy culminating in chafed red hands and wrists. Cortisone and — for brief periods, when it got bad enough — yellow dish gloves to discourage contact with the infected skin area helped, but only the inevitable loss of interest in whatever up to that point had absorbed her so entirely signalled the beginning of the healing process for his sister’s rubbed-raw skin.

  And like a lone teetotaller in a sweaty room full of raging drunks, like a voyeur standing around with his hands in his pockets at an orgy in full swing, when Patty was like this, at her scratching fervent worst, frankly she made Bayle just a little bit nervous. Might even have scared him a little. All right, she scared him. Scared the hell out of him. Bayle came to inherit a guilty relief at the sight of his melancholy sister’s perfect white hands.

  Patty didn’t say anything. After a while, she got up to flip over the record, the monk’s chanting eventually giving way to the snap, pop, and dull thud that announced that the needle had gone as far as it could go, that the music was over. Worse than the sound of the scratching, Bayle hated to hear his sister silent.

  Patty flipped over the record. A hundred perfect voices of unshakeable devotion poured out of the cheap speakers.

  “Sometimes’” she said, “I don’t think you listen to me, Peter.”

  “Quick little piece, isn’t she?” the grey-haired man beside Bayle said. Bayle’s frantic attempt to get the passing stewardess’s attention and, at the same time, not appear as absolutely intoxication-desperate as he suddenly was, resulted only in the sort of wide-eyed and full-toothed smile that is usually accompanied by a caption underneath asking Have Seen This Man? and advising the use of extreme caution. “Don’t worry, though,” the man continued. “She’ll be back this way sooner or later.”

  Just then the nun returned from the bathroom looking just as beatific as before. Bayle wished she was a flying nun and that she would take a three-thousand-foot fucking leap out of his sight. No sister of mine. You’re not my sister.

  “See?” the man said. “Here she comes now. Sooner than later, too. The little honeys can run all day but they can’t hide forever.”

  Metaphysician heal thyself, Bayle thought. Look the little honey straight in the eye and tell
her what you want. Need.

  The stewardess stopped the cart in the aisle and rested her hands on slightly bent knees to better hear Bayle’s question. Bayle looked up from his seat at the mascara and smile looking down at him and pointed out his heart’s desire.

  The woman told him how much his drink cost and Bayle paid her. The grey-haired man had another paper cup of complimentary coffee, took three packets of sugars and two containers of cream, two packages of free chocolate chip cookies, and six napkins. The woman asked Bayle if he himself might like some cookies for later. Bayle shook his head, no, said he didn’t think so, no, so the woman gave him two more packages of peanuts and three additional napkins instead. Each in his own fashion, Bayle and his seatmate set to work on their loaded-up trays.

  Bayle pushed the silver button on his armrest and eased back in his seat, sipping at his drink. Before long, the older man’s alternating long coffee slurps and quick, rabbit-mouthed cookie nibbles sent him reluctantly forward in his chair and back to Empiricus.

  Leaning over the book, fresh sip of whiskey taken in and glass on its way trayward again, a single drop of Canadian Club escaped his mouth, rolled onto the topmost part of his bottom lip, held for a fraction of a second on the lower, and then splashed onto page four, a large liquid point of punctuation falling directly onto the middle section of Book 1, Chapter i:

  We make no firm assertions that any of what we are about to say is exactly like we say it is, but we simply declare our position on each topic as it now appears to us, like a reporter.

  Bayle watched the wet dot slowly soak its way through the page, the whiskey’s brown gradually turning into the page’s white.

  A wet dot slowly soaking its way through the page, Bayle thought; the whiskey’s brown gradually turning into the page’s white. Period. Not a metaphor or symbol to be seen for as far as the eye can see. None.